


Can you hear my faintest breath?

by aingeal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bottom Steve Rogers, Captain America: The First Avenger, First Time, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-War, Roommates, Roommates to lovers, Smut, Top Bucky Barnes, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2018-12-21 08:08:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11939931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aingeal/pseuds/aingeal
Summary: Bucky was still on the other side of the plasterboard partition, three inches and a million miles away. Steve was tortured by the fact he hadn’t kept quiet, that Bucky might’ve heard him in his throes of needy, shameless, pathetic vicarious pleasure.It was awful, what Steve felt, but it could be ok, as long as Bucky never found out.(Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes share an apartment with not enough space and very thin walls in pre-war Brooklyn. Bucky keeps bringing girls back for the night and Steve can't take it any more. Things take a turn between them.)





	1. Chapter 1

The nights were beginning to draw in after the hot damp New York summer. Standing in the apartment with the windows wide open to take the smell of frying kipper outside, Steve was almost too cold in just his shirt, suspenders and pants. He turned his face to the night air and saw some stars out there in the firmament, glittering blue and coldly lonely, very different from the smoggy yellow summer skies that had crowned Brooklyn only a few weeks ago.

After his supper of kipper and potatoes, Steve sat down for a while at the little table in the middle of the room to read the funny papers, not really for enjoyment, but to study the drawing and composition, occasionally clipping out a panel or a whole strip because of a particularly clever rhythm or pacing, or something unusual in the layout. Herriman was his absolute favourite and most weeks drew something that blew Steve’s mind as to what comic strips could do. 

Moths were bumping rhythmically against the bare bulb hanging above the table. One suddenly fizzled, blowing itself out in a blaze and the smell of burnt dust, and it startled to Steve into realising he’d fallen asleep. He’d been dreaming with his cheek propped on his fist, wandering in the surreal, horizonless world of Krazy and Ignatz’s Coconino County, full of flying bricks and shifting landscapes. Time for bed. He placed his clippings in the manila box file that also held his sketchbooks, and folded and piled the rest of the newspapers by the front door to take down to the trash in the morning. Then he folded up the table and placed it against the gas cooking bracket, placed the chair with its back to the wall, folded his clothes and placed them on the chair, removed some miscellaneous things that had ended up on his bed through the course of the day, wound up his alarm clock, and slid himself in beneath the eiderdown in his underthings. He left the curtains open so he could see the black sky and the more densely black buildings silhouetted against it, with their occasional lighted window forming their own, yellower stars. 

Thoughts that Steve had before he fell asleep: _My pillow smells like kipper. I wonder if we can ever afford an actual two room apartment instead of this miserable hole. Bucky better come in quietly tonight, I gotta get up early tomorrow. Where on earth is he anyway?_

*

Because of course he wouldn’t, Bucky did not come back in quietly. Bucky _thought_ that he was coming in quietly, but in reality Steve was woken up before Bucky had even got in through the door. Steve had only just properly fallen asleep, and hearing Bucky take four tries to fit his key in the lock while swearing in a stage whisper, with whomever he was with giggling her head off beside him, made sure Steve was wide awake and a hell of a lot of pissed off before Bucky even made it into the apartment. Furious, but also exhausted, Steve didn’t have the energy to make a scene, so he ostentatiously dragged his pillow from under his head, flopped on to his stomach and clamped the pillow over his ears.

“Sssssshhhhh!” he heard Bucky whisper dramatically, even through the pillow. “My roomie’s asleep!”

“Okay!” whispered back a female voice, before it erupted into stifled giggles again when Bucky tripped over the newspapers by the front door and sent them spilling across the room. Steve was mentally calling Bucky all sorts of names, but all he did was bury his head deeper in to the lumpy mattress and tell himself he was sleeping peacefully in a king sized bed within the luxurious mansion which he owned all by himself and didn’t have to share with any lousy roommates with no sense of common decency.

Bucky’s bed was behind a plasterboard partition that ostensibly split the apartment in to two rooms: the kitchen/Steve’s “room”, and Bucky’s “room”, which really was just a windowless sliver of space wide enough for a faucet and a single bed. The bed was against the partition, exactly mirroring Steve’s- the two beds were only separated by inches of cheap plaster. The two chorus-line girls who had shared the apartment before Bucky and Steve moved in had hung a silk scarf across the entrance to the second “room” for privacy, and it was still there, though the boys didn’t really bother much with it. Tonight though, Bucky ostentatiously swung the scarf down from the peg. _Oh brother_ , thought Steve to himself, _this again_.

The plasterboard partition did almost nothing to muffle the sounds coming from Bucky’s half of the room through to where Steve was lying. He could perfectly clearly hear the giggling continue, joined by the low rumbling of Bucky’s voice, too deep for Steve to make out the words. Then the bedsprings, right next to Steve, groaned and creaked as they took the weight of two bodies. The giggling increased in pitch and volume, but was cut short by a sudden silence. 

Steve lay very still, on his stomach, his hands cradling the pillow to his ears.

The silence swelled with rich, suggestive tension, growing to fill the whole apartment.

Steve squeezed his eyes tight shut and clamped his hands to his ears even harder, but of course those efforts were useless against images inside his mind. They came unbidden, conjured up by the thick, close silence. They were wonderful, terrible, disturbing, irresistible. He pictured what might be happening in that silence. The man and the girl on the bed… Maybe they had started sitting side by side, when Bucky had leaned in and kissed her full on the mouth, his broad lips eating up her silly nervous giggling. A quiet, still kiss to begin with, until it wasn’t, until it got deep and swallowed their breathing, until her spine went weak and she leaned back onto the coarse blankets, and Bucky followed her with his mouth, his chest, his weight, his body.

The springs gave another slight groan, and Steve heard, or imagined he heard, the slightest little sigh.

He would be touching her now, one of his hands at the round collar of her blouse, slipping the silk-covered button from its little loop of ribbon, parting the fabric from about her creamy skin. She would be still, like a snake’s prey transfixed in its gaze, stuck in front of what is coming for it. But that’s not the right metaphor, because her stillness would not be fear, it would be fear’s opposite- and her pulse would be rising in her throat to meet the sliding touch of Bucky’s fingers, and her breast would be rising faster and harder, and her bosom would be swelling with each breath, and Bucky would be cupping one side of her full flesh in his hand, inside her blouse, and beneath the filmy gauze of her underthings her nipple would be hard against his calloused fingers.

On his side of the partition, Steve shifted in his bed. Without realising, his hands had slackened and he’d turned his face to the wall, freeing his ears, now trying to catch the littlest sound instead of struggling to block them out. His ears were crimson and hot. Lying on his stomach, his hard penis was pressed against the mattress through his shorts, tangled up around the top of his thighs as they were, too big for him, twisted round his waist, digging in to the place between his legs, making him uncomfortable, adding to his restlessness. 

He heard a moan, and his heart flung itself against his ribs.

It was moving fast then, whatever was happening behind the partition. She must be pliant beneath Bucky now, and his weight must be above her, on her, and her clothes must be in disarray, her pale flesh shining in the deep gloom, with Bucky’s dark head occluding that paleness as it moved over it, kissing, tasting. His hand would be on her thigh, pushing up her skirt, pulling down any fabric in his way, stroking and pushing and teasing until it reached the deepest well of darkness between her thighs and touched her there, drawing forth that moan which repeated itself again, and again, until it seemed she couldn’t stop and so it became one moan, long, broken up by her gasping breath. Steve pictured her wet, welcoming, pictured Bucky’s fingers gliding inexorably, pictured the concentration on his face as he found the pinnacle of her and touched her the way he must be touching her to make her moan like that. 

The moan carried on, but now it was joined by a rhythmic creaking and a light thumping, as the bedsprings swayed and the bed frame touched against the wall, shifting with each movement that was happening atop it. 

In Steve’s imagination Bucky was moving, pressing her into the bed and rocking her there, with his fingers enveloped in her wet heat, pressing inside her and unable to not move himself, his pelvis against her pelvis, his knees and elbows digging in to the mattress, his hips astir, moving them both slowly and irresistibly. His face would be in her breasts or her neck, or he would be kissing her with his lips and tongue, and on his face would be an expression that Steve, who knew Bucky’s face better than he knew his own, had never seen before.

This Steve had heard before though, this groan he could now hear, as close as if he was in the bed beside Bucky- this groan that had punched Steve in the gut the first time he heard it, and punched him the same way every time since, tonight no exception. Bucky’s guttural groan of pleasure, which sounded like it came from the very depths of him, drawn out and breathy and low as it was, shocked-sounding, exhilarating, torturous. Steve whimpered as if in reply, face now in the mattress, crimson ear to the wall, hips bearing down, pressing his erection again and again against the bed, creating delicious pressure, desperate to hear Bucky’s noise again. 

It came- louder, rougher, and Steve knew Bucky was inside her now, was enveloped in her. Her thighs would be spread wide, letting him in, or wrapped around his waist to draw him closer. Steve pictured Bucky with his shirt open to show his bare torso with its dark hair, his firm stomach clenching and releasing as he slowly pushed himself forward and back, the sweat that would glaze his olive skin. And Steve pictured Bucky’s cock. Something else he'd never seen, for all they lived in such close confines; except the one time Bucky had gotten hard in his pants, and Steve had seen it, and never forgotten it: that thick heaviness that had filled the confined space, distending the fabric. Big.

He knew he shouldn’t. He knew he should be thinking of the girl, thinking of her softness and her swelling flesh, her pretty hair and pink lips and nipples. And he was, in a way, a confused way that made his stomach churn and his hips stutter- made him want to stop and carry on all at the same time- because the way he thought of her was as if he was her. In his imagination he was the one lying beneath Bucky, with Bucky everywhere on top and within him, with his legs wide, with Bucky deep inside. He was the one with soft skin that Bucky wanted to touch, he was the one who made Bucky make that noise because of how it felt to be inside him.

It was agony to think that way, beautiful and awful, and it made orgasm begin to tingle in Steve’s feet and thighs. He moved his hips harder, rubbing himself with needy pushes into the mattress in time to the sounds he could hear just beside him, as close as if he was in bed next to Bucky. The bed knocked against the wall faster and louder, and Bucky was grunting quiet, concentrated, tortured grunts, punctuated by more of his breathy groans. Steve was with him in the dense, hot darkness, his mind and body so attuned to the pleasure he could hear. It must be so passionate now, Bucky must be as deep as he could be inside the girl’s body. He was thrusting with unbridled force, and she would be seeing stars as his length and thickness opened her up to the most intense pleasure. Bucky would have his head bowed, strands of hair falling in his face, eyes closed, brows knitted and mouth open as he fucked her as hard as he could. 

The images were unbearable for Steve, his mind swirling with the possibilities, the most delicious and the most arousing of all an image of himself, not in the place of the girl, not as a girl at all, but simply himself, like this, skinny and pale and naked, on his front, his knees spreading on the bed, and Bucky behind and astraddle him, with his cock inside Steve, like he was inside this girl tonight, but different, more obscene, more carnal, more shocking and raw, because Steve was a man and Bucky’s cock could only be inside him if it went inside his ass. Steve had to bury his face into the pillow to stop himself moaning aloud as this image flooded his mind, taking over all the other images. He couldn’t stop himself- he turned on to his back and yanked his shorts off, and bent and spread his knees wide, and palmed himself up and down there, spreading the wetness from the tip of his penis all over himself, down past his tight balls to his asshole, the place where he wanted Bucky to be. He got both hands on himself and rubbed fast and hard, on his sensitive cock, and his hungry asshole, which felt so good when he touched it, when he circled it with his fingertips and pushed them just a little bit inside… Firecrackers popped behind his eyes and the orgasm that had been building in his stomach and thighs suddenly spilled over him, rushing up over his head like a wave and then pounding through his whole body, powerful and fiery, making him come all over his stomach, while his asshole twitched and spasmed around his moving fingertips. He gasped and gritted his teeth, determined not to make a noise, but the shockwaves carried on so powerfully, and next to his head he could hear Bucky orgasming with long drawn-out moans of satisfaction, joined by the higher-pitched sounds of the girl’s own climax, and so he couldn’t help but whimper and cry out, still rubbing at himself, because his hole was still clutching at his fingers, because as good as it felt it wasn’t nearly enough. 

As the pleasure gradually subsided, his come cooling on his stomach, and his sweat cooling at his hairline, his whole body began to shiver. He wrapped himself back up in the eiderdown and curled in a ball, slightly ashamed by the wetness and tingling he could still feel between his legs, more ashamed by the smell of himself on his fingers, and even more so by the hollowness and loneliness in his chest. Bucky was still on the other side of the plasterboard partition, three inches and a million miles away. Steve was tortured by the fact he hadn’t kept quiet, that Bucky might’ve heard him in his throes of needy, shameless, pathetic vicarious pleasure. It was awful, what Steve felt, but it could be ok, as long as Bucky never found out.


	2. Chapter 2

I wake up in the morning with this awful fucking feeling like I’ve forgotten something. I’m wide awake, up in this big startle, all of a sudden, halfway out the bed with my goddamn heart beating its way clean through my ribs, feels like. Some dream I was having still extending its tendrils from my subconscious, something about falling from a huge height, something about trying to run but my legs not working. 

“Hey, what’n’th’hell you doing?” A voice slurs beside me and then I realise what that horrible feeling I’m having must be about. A broad, lying on her front, rubbing her face in my pillow, arms up to frame her tousled blonde head. The previous night just goes whistling through my mind at high speed and I can taste the booze in my mouth and I realise I’m naked and my dick is all slick still and when I rub at my face I can smell her on my fingers and god fucking damnit I did it again. 

“Sh,” I say quickly because this broad sure does have a voice on her and god knows what time it is and I don’t want Steve to hear nothing if he’s sleeping. Fish my wristwatch from the pile of clothing on the floor and peer at it through the gloom and shit it’s already 9 and I got to be down at the dock in less than one hour if I’m not gonna get my ass strung out and lose my place, which can’t happen because we’d be homeless without my wage packet. So, “C’mon, time to get up sweetheart” I say with none too much warmth in my voice and I’m up yanking yesterday’s clothes back on and throwing the girl’s smalls at her while she bats at the air like she’s being attacked and squawks something chronic and calls me all sorts of lousy names, I guess she thought she’d made it sweet with me and who knows what on earth I was saying to her last night or what but obviously what she’s woken up to was not what she thought she went to bed with, but then again I could say the same for myself.

Good thing at least is it’s Friday morning which means Steve will’ve been up and out a long time ago to open up at Hennessy’s for a long day of hawking bubblegum and sodas so at least this yapping and carrying on won’t be disturbing him.

I’m at the mirror above the sink combing down my hair and rubbing lipstick off my jaw when the girl appears in the kitchen and looks about the room like she’s interested in our set up here but I don’t want her prying and I’m certainly not in the mood to be hanging around making her coffee not that we got any coffee to make anyway but so I’m hustling her out the door ASAP and promising to call her and making a big show about it so hopefully she’ll be halfways down the block before she remembers she didn’t ever actually give me her number. 

So if this makes me out as less than an officer and a gentleman you’ll have to forgive the drunken errors of a young lad every once in a while when he’s got his head all up in a twist and doesn’t even know whether he’s coming or going half or most of the time. 

Now the big blonde buxomness and scent of her is out the door I can breathe a little bit but unfortunately for me that just makes everything come clearer in my mind, real big and bold and bright in dazzling technicolor you might say, and it makes me feel so crappy I just put my head in my hands and groan a little, just a quiet long groan to drown things out. When I open my eyes though of course I’m looking at Steve’s bed where he’s made it all neat and tidy like he does every morning, not like me who crawls into the same tangle at night I left when I woke up, and there’s not even a dent where his head was on the pillow, and I imagine him up and dressed in the quiet light of the early morning and beating that thin little pillow as plump as it can get and then smoothing and tucking the sheets all shipshape like no-one’s even slept there ever. And I imagine the warmth trapped in there from his sleeping body and I’m wanting to see if it’s still there, if I peeled back those sheets whether I could feel it rising, if I could find any evidence of him. This thought leads to more thoughts that I haven’t got TIME to think about right now, I should’ve been out the door already to catch the streetcar and if I lose my position we’ll lose this place and I’ll probably lose Steve because a) he’ll hate me and b) we won’t live together like this and I won’t have the opportunity to stand around getting my stomach in a twist over his goddamn BED SHEETS of all things so TIME TO GO, BUCK.

I should really have shaved today and I’ll get stick for having a blue chin at the office but better stick than the sack so I’m heading out now in hopes of clocking in on time. 

You don’t wanna hear about my day and I don’t want to relive it by talking it all over so suffice it to say it was long and boring and I did a lot of pointless things that someone somewhere thinks are really important and I got yelled at for being scruffy but I didn’t get asked to not come back next week so that’s something. And I know it’s one hell of a cheeseball cliche but it sure is true that it’s hard to be miserable about something when you’re keeping busy. All of your capacity for misery gets taken up with drudging through another endless boring day at your boring dead-end job that pays a pittance, I guess. You know every day I get that bit closer to enlisting even though I never would’ve thought of myself as an armed services guy but it’s got to be better than being a lowly clerk at a crappy little shipping firm right? And maybe a bit of distance would do me good, straighten me up a bit, give me some perspective, things like that. Maybe. I sure could do with some of those things though because as soon as I’m out the office door and heading home all the things I’ve managed to not think about all day just come hurtling back in to my mind at 100 miles an hour, and not only my mind, that’s the worst thing, it’s like being physically ill, because it goes in to my whole body- my stomach all tied it up in pretzel-y twists and my legs all wobbly and my chest tight as a balloon and my head all light and fizzly, and you know why? You want to know why I’m all tangled up in this sorry state? Would you even believe that all this and more is the singular goddamn fault of that good-for-nothing little punk, one Steven Grant Rogers? 

I know, maybe you’re shocked, or maybe you’re laughing your head off that someone as handsome and manly as myself could be round the bend for that scrawny little slip of blue-eyed nothing and if I wasn’t so intimately involved in the scenario I’d be laughing too most likely. Well raise a glass for poor old Bucky Barnes because I am far, extremely far from being able to laugh about the whole thing. Especially when you bring a girl in to the picture, correction, when _I_ bring a girl in to the picture like I did last night, because all flippancy aside it makes me feel crummy to treat another human being badly and she didn’t deserve it, she was out for a good time and I made pretend that I was too and that I was a normal-hearted and red-blooded male and all that. When the sorry truth is I am not any of those things, and while I’m being honest I may as well tell you that I only took her home because she was a blonde and the way her hair looked against her pale skin reminded me of him. Now don’t get me wrong, I had my fun and I have no problems performing in intimate situations with a woman, no problems at all, and I feel safe to say she would have had no complaints to make with yours truly until I unceremoniously kicked her out this morning. That’s not the point and I wouldn’t want you getting the wrong idea. That I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. 

But the thing is. O god, the thing is, the thing that’s making me go loopy in the head and in the stomach, the thing is, is that I wanted him to hear and I think he did. I wanted him to know I can get anyone I want and isn’t that sick? It is sick because it’s like bragging but like cutting my own nose off to spite my face at the same time because it’s the exact opposite of what I really want, which is the one thing I actually can't get. But it’s also amazingly golden and wonderful because even though I can barely dare to think about it I think he did hear me, and I think I heard him, and I think that he liked it. 

But what _was_ it that he liked? That’s what’s causing me misery and grief and making me want to wail and gnash my teeth right here on the sidewalk or else just go to the nearest hole-in-the-wall bar and find a loose chick and look her in the eye and take her home and fuck her til I’m senseless, oh yeah I guess it’s supposed to be until _she’s_ senseless, but I don’t give a shit, and if I knew a better drug I’d take it. 

That’s melodrama but I equally don’t give a shit. Because I sincerely don’t know and it’s cutting me in to little pieces and I can’t handle it. I just don’t know if he.  
I don’t know so much about him, really, for all we’ve been friends since grade school and he sleeps two inches away from me in the tiniest apartment in all of Brooklyn. He’s like a cardboard cut out sometimes, and sometimes he looks at me like he thinks I’m a big galumphing oaf, himself all slim and quiet and self-sufficient like a little siamese cat.  
And but then sometimes he looks at me like.  
But I don’t know. I just don’t know and you can’t out and ask another fella a thing like that, can you? The poor kid, what if I told him and he realised he’d been sharing an apartment with a sex pervert the whole time and then we’d be finished in totalis as Steve and Bucky and what’s Bucky without Steve in this town? A whole heap of nothing, I can tell you. 

I don’t even know if he’s ever been with a woman. Maybe what I heard, correction, what I _thought_ I heard was on account of that, of hearing a woman going wild like she was. But I’ve bought back dames a couple times and he’s just banged on the wall for us to keep it down and been matey about it and I kept it quiet like he asked. I don’t know what was different about last night but I felt it. I don’t care if I sound nutty or delusional but I felt it. Felt what exactly, Mr Barnes? Well if I could put it in words I would and I wouldn’t be in half as much of a muddle as I currently am, I assure you. 

I guess it was like, a connection. Like there was a string connecting us between that thin wall and I was aware of him and he was aware of me and it wasn’t like there was a dame with me at all. It’s like I was doing the telling and he was doing the listening. Or I was doing the listening and he was doing the telling. And my telling was like a scream and his was like a whisper but we were both really listening for the first time and his listening felt like I could drown in it. 

Well now I’ve said it it does indeed sound both nutty and delusional.

But even though I’m trying to real fucking hard to, the thing that I can’t deny is I that I heard him. I heard him, I know I did, even though it was just a tiny…   
O lord help me it’s turning me inside out and I can’t think about it too hard because otherwise I'll die but I did hear him even though his sound was so tiny like he was trying to hide it. He was trying to hide it from me and it’s torturing me trying to work out what that means. 

But I’m nearly there and I guess he’s probably already gotten home and I sincerely wonder if these jelly legs will be able to carry me all the way up these goddamn stairs.


End file.
